The hospitality industry is changing rapidly, and you want to change with it! But the question is, how do you do that? The answer is pretty simple: you go online to reach a wider audience that allows you to increase your sales while cutting down on your operating expenses. But if creating your own online food delivery service is so easy, why doesn’t everyone do it? Well, because it ain’t that easy.
Whether you’re a restaurant that already has an online food delivery platform or one that is thinking about starting one, this article is for you. Continue reading and unlock the secrets to how you can create your own booming online food delivery platform.
5 Tips To Help You Boost Your Online Food Delivery Platform’s Performance?
Now that we understand how critical online food delivery platforms are in the post-COVID19 hospitality industry let’s look at what makes them great. Here is a comprehensive breakdown of the top five tenets that will enable you to enhance your online delivery experience and increase your restaurant sales!
#1 Focus On Your Menu
Since 2014 the hospitality industry has seen a consistent increase in the number of restaurants that are adopting an online delivery system. Due to the COVID19 pandemic, the inevitable shift has expedited. Today with fierce competition in the online food delivery market, it is difficult for new restaurants to make a dent into the market without getting creative.
Leverage the ordering data gathered by your restaurant management system, and identify what works and what doesn’t. By analyzing your customer’s ordering patterns, you can understand your best-selling food items and optimize your menu accordingly.
Lunch specialized offers and coupons to propel the sales of already well-performing menu items to increase profits. Simultaneously, remove food items that don’t perform well from your menu to cut down on operational costs.
#2 Optimize Order Processing & Management
An average netizen’s attention span on the internet is just a mere 4-5 seconds. As a result, if your online ordering process isn’t simplified and easy to learn, then you’re bound to have multiple abandoned orders. Hence, you must optimize your online food delivery platform’s ordering processing & management.
Establish a direct line of communication with your kitchen & service staff to minimize order delays. You can also use a POS system to keep track of orders in a time-bound manner to prioritize cooking and shorting delivery times.
#3 Develop A Strategic Marketing Campaign
You can’t increase your online sales without developing a strategic online marketing campaign. The online food delivery market is plagued with cutthroat competition. Hence, you need to have an edge. Therefore you need to deploy strategic marketing assets to ensure your online delivery business’s success.
Create personalized combos, offers, discounts, etc. to entice individual customers to order more often. Launch a consistent email and SMS outreach campaign to keep your existing customers engaged and coming for more. In the end, you must leverage user-data from your website and mobile application to your advantage.
#4 Provide Contactless Online Food Delivery Services
The COVID19 pandemic has become the most momentous thing to happen at the beginning of the decade of the 2020s. While the pandemic is a temporary anomaly, the far-reaching impacts might very well not be.
The idea of social-distancing has been ingrained into the minds of billions across the globe. The fact that pathogens can spread unabated through physical contact has now captured the public imagination. Therefore, restaurants need to adapt to this new and challenging reality within the industry.
The operational implications that arise from social-distancing, can be solved by the utilization of contactless services. What are contactless services, you may ask? Well, they are exactly, what the name suggests, devoid of any physical human contact.
The food is prepared by ultra-hygienic & sanitized procedures and then delivered to a predetermined location set by the customer to avoid people-to-people interaction while accepting the delivery. The payment for the food is transmitted through online methods like; ‘net-banking, credit & debit cards, etc.’
#5 Establish Efficient Management SOPs
Ideating, creating, and building an online food ordering system is an extremely tough yet rewarding endeavor. You, as a restaurant owner, need to pay special attention to the many facets of this multifactorial process. While, you can outsource the design and development of many components that make your online food delivery system work.
You can’t, however, outsource your staff and how they operate in a radically different and new operational environment. Ergo, you must develop new specialized Standard Operating Procedures to handle the facets of your restaurant business.
In Conclusion
The above five tips are essential to help you create an online food delivery platform that functions flawlessly. It must be understood by restaurant owners that the hospitality industry is no longer the same as it was pre-COVID19. The world has changed, and it is time that restaurants change with it to face new challenges of the new reality.
